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Turtles Back Home in Upgraded Ponds

The School of Biological Sciences turtle ponds, jewels of the popular Tower Garden between the Main Building
and Biological Laboratories, underwent much-needed repairs this spring. With the
turtles relocated to temporary quarters at UT’s Pickle Research Center, contractors
and volunteers removed years of silt accumulation and repaired cracks in the ponds’
concrete liner. Volunteers replanted the pond with new aquatic vegetation and brought
the turtles home in time for Commencement. There are even new logs and rocks for
the turtles to sun themselves on.

The ponds were built over the period 1934 – 1939, about a decade after Bio Labs
were completed and during the construction of the Tower. While obviously appropriate
for the Botany and Zoology Departments (both of which occupied Bio Labs at that
time), apparently neither department claimed the ponds as its own, and maintenance
was sporadic.

Guy Thompson (Professor Emeritus, Botany and MCDB) describes
himself as an “unofficial guardian” of the ponds for many years, gaining the position
“by default” after the death of Botany Professor Richard Starr. Since Thompson joined
the University in 1967, the ponds have received only one serious cleaning, in 1991.
The water recirculation system was not installed until 1996. Before then the ponds
were filled with city water that flowed out of the ponds into a storm sewer – “The
water bill was found to be $2,000 per month,” Thompson says. The present recirculation
system is augmented by rainwater collected from the roof of the nearby greenhouse.

During his guardianship, Thompson tried valiantly to relocate turtles when their
numbers became too great and threatened survival of the pond’s plant life. His task
was made more difficult, he says, by the unfortunate tendency of some students to
dump their aquaria into the pond when they left for the summer!

One of the more colorful inhabitants of the ponds was Snappy, the largest of several
snapping turtles. “You probably have heard about the large snapping turtles that
used to lie just below the surface of the ponds and grab pigeons when they came
to drink,” Thompson says. “Many people have observed pigeons suddenly disappearing
below the surface with a frantic flapping of wings.”

The pond renovations even became a focus of Paul Gottlieb’s Director’s address to
graduating Biology students during last May’s Convocation. “The degree of emotional
connectedness to the turtle ponds that I have encountered among students and all
campus inhabitants and visitors has been astounding,” Gottlieb said. “E.O. Wilson
… muses in his recent book, The Future of Life, that the love that Homo sapiens
has for natural settings may reflect something called the ‘savannah hypothesis:’
Quoting Wilson: “… Homo sapiens is likely to be genetically specialized for the
ancestral environment so that today, even in the most sequestered stone-and-glass
cities, we still prefer it. Part of human nature is a residue of bias in mental
development that causes us to gravitate back to savannahs or their surrogates.”
Whether or not this preference for natural environments may be genetically built
into Homo sapiens as Wilson suggests, we do resonate to natural settings … the Texas
Hill Country, our national parks, rivers and lakes and oceans, the mountains – and
on a reduced scale, our very own local turtle ponds.”

Renovation of the turtle ponds comes just ahead of additional landscaping that will
emphasize the Tower Garden’s dedication to the victims of the Charles Whitman shootings
of 1963. Landscape architect Eleanor H. McKinney and visual artist Jill Bedgood
are designing a memorial that will be dedicated on August 1, 2003.